Item Summary

Western Bukidnon Manobo is the language of some 8,000 Manobo people in the southwestern portion of the province of Bukidnon on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. It is one of a number of Manobo languages all of which belong to the Philippine Branch of the Austronesian language family. This dissertation is a taxonomic approach to the description of the major grammatical patterns, both syntactic and morphological, of Western Bukidnon Manobo. The analysis utilizes linguistic insights of two different theoretical frameworks, i.e. the linguistic levels of tagmemics and the notation and certain of the operations developed by the transformationalists. The point of departure for the description of syntactic patterns is the phrase level in Chapter II. The inventory of basic phrase types and formulae presented there are requisite to the formulaic descriptions of clauses and the transformational operations described in subsequent chapters. Since the noun phrases bear a heavy functional load as predicate complements, their description constitutes the major portion of this chapter. Utilizing Harris' notion that certain constructions of a language are more basic than others, a set of kernel clauses is defined in Chapter III. Manobo kernel clauses are either verbal or nonverbal. The verbal clauses manifest the focus types which are typical of other Philippine languages. The nonverbal clause types described are classificational and existential. A chapter entitled "Transformational Patterns" . accounts for structural relationships between constructions on the same and on different linguistic levels. Clause to clause transformations show the relations of kernel clauses to interrogative and emphatic clauses. Embedding transformations accounts for the formation of a number of complex phrase types which are derived from kernel clauses. Combining transformations account for the relations of kernel clauses to complex sentences which are combinations of clauses in coordinate or independent-subordinate relationships. Chapter V describes the morphological patterns on the word level. Parts of speech are particles, pronouns, and full words. Syntactic criteria further divide full words into adjuncts, descriptives, nouns, and verbs. A major part of this chapter is a treatment of the inflectional categories of the verb with details and examples of allomorphic variation';- The final chapter briefly summarizes and concludes that a description utilizing a taxonomic approach which incorporates the derivation of more complex structures from basic or kernel structures is the most useful means of describing the grammatical patterns of a language.

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